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Climate Change Accounting Goes Public in a Big Way

By Mindy S. Lubber, InsideClimate News

Jun 19, 2009

Flashy billboards are usually not my thing, but it's hard not to be grabbed by the 67-by-32-foot billboard unveiled yesterday outside New York City's Penn Station.

Deutsche Bank launched the world's first "Carbon Counter," an electronic display that digitally shows the real-time, cumulative pollution we are emitting that is causing the planet to heat up. Half a million people will see the billboard daily, and millions more can do so online at know-the-number.com.

The Carbon Counter vividly drives home a vital point not only about climate change – 800 tons of carbon pollution is going into the atmosphere every second – but about a short-sighted economic system that is burdening our planet like never before: We haven't been honestly accounting for the environmental costs of everything we do.

When there were no controls for sooty particles belching from our power plants, we literally choked on the results. When companies did not have to pay for controls to stop raw sewage and chemicals pouring into our streams, our fish died. In those instances, we tallied the societal costs, realized they were too high, and put a stop to it.

Now we're facing a less-than-honest tally of our carbon dioxide costs, and that accounting mistake is already having enormous impacts in every corner of the U.S. and the world.

The market price of emitting this pollution has long and, quite irrationally, been zero. Those costs have not figured into what we pay to power our factories, drive our cars or heat our homes.

So guess what? We end up using a lot more energy – and polluting a lot more – than we (rationally) ought to, since we don't pay the price of polluting when we buy fuel or turn on our lights.

Bad cost accounting distorts decision-making – I can assure you, we'd all be eating more steak if the cost of cattle feed wasn't included in beef prices.

The Carbon Counter places this contradiction out in the open, where everyone can see it. It exposes in plain sight the hidden environmental cost of our energy use by tallying in plain sight the accumulating gases destabilizing our climate.

By doing so, it also exploits a key insight about human behavior that's been documented by behavioral economists: When the price of costly activities is no longer hidden from humans, we're more likely to pursue those activities prudently. That's why the simple act of placing an electricity consumption meter in plain view can substantially cut a home's energy use, or why installing real-time miles-per-gallon meters in cars changes the way we drive.

Let's also set new standards for the business world, not just environmentally but in apportioning financial risk, because durably strong economies are built on the idea that everyone can clearly see the costs and risks of a given path, and that hasn't been happening.

After all, it was wildly overpriced compensation from Wall Street to Main Street that helped ignite our financial mess. Too many people were reaping rich payoffs up front while offloading all the risks from mortgages and securities they were selling onto society. Heads I win, tails you lose: What incentive was there to NOT be reckless?

That's why the new Carbon Counter's not just a gimmick.

By showing us all the day-to-day environmental toll of our actions it will, in one small way, help move decision-makers – from Washington to your kitchen table – to attach real, honestly-measured prices to those actions. And that type of transparency in turn will inspire a wave of change and innovation that will change the rules of the game, environmentally and economically.